Oracle Blog

It's hip to be square!

Friday Feb 20, 2009

George Colony spoke in yesterday morning's Omniture Summit 09 keynote, and one of his eight big messages for CEOs was that the web is moving to what he calls "the executable web," meaning that instead of your browser being just a file viewer, it will become an application platform for applications downloaded off the web. Gee. That sounds kinda familiar... like from about a decade ago! Applets anyone? It really ticks me off that "Java™ is dead" while at the same time, everyone is busily trying to recreate Java in JavaScript. Hey, I know! Why not just fragging use Java? JavaScript is ugly and painful. AJAX is an order of magnitude worse. (Don't tell me about how much better Python and Ruby are than Java. That's a different topic.) I know that Sun is notorious for being way too early to the market with its technologies. Yes, applets did suck ten years ago. (Although, ten years ago there wasn't an alternative for RIAs, so at the same time it was revolutionary, cutting-edge technology.) Have you looked at applets lately? Check this out. Let's see you port that to JavaScript. I think it's just silly that with the current state of Java technology people are still thinking about the platform based on impressions from last millennium. Wake up and smell the coffee.